After a headmistress warns that overpraise of daughters leads to the
development of little princesses who can’t take risks for fear of failure, Ian
Douglas, a father of one girl, treads the line between positive
reinforcement and spoiling.

Self-esteem has a history. We can trace it back to William James in 1890, who saw it as a function of successes divided by pretensions. Have a look at what you’ve been able to do and what you aspire to being and you have a neat little ratio.

Freud continued the discussion, talking about self-esteem as part of self-regard and narcissism. Where the conscious mind meets the ideals of the unconscious ego, self-esteem increases. Robert White took the ball and ran hard in 1963, defining it as a self-regulating function based on experience of success and failure. ‘Self-esteem has its taproot in the experience of efficacy,’ he said.

The self-obsessed sixties and seventies came and went, and our contemporary understanding of self-esteem begins to emerge. In 1979 Morris Rosenberg, he of the eponymous Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (test your own here) turned it into a feeling of being good enough, worthy but not in awe of oneself, on an equal footing with the best of everyone else, not necessarily ahead.

This egalitarian self-respect sounds pretty good to many parents. We dream of raising happy, fulfilled, high-achieving better versions of ourselves, free of all the doubt and setbacks, and we pick up an impression as we skim-read the parenting manuals that there’s a golden path to achieving this in our children: praise.

What to do, then, as a father who can’t help seeing his daughter as a daily miracle with a storybook, an endlessly astonishing little genius that other parents surely must be chewing their knuckles with envy over?

I’d be slightly surprised if you thought I had an answer. Who is your daughter? What does she deserve praise for? What has she tried really hard to achieve? When you were young, what did you feel you had done that had been ignored, and did that hurt? What piece of encouragement can you remember that really spurred you on to do something you were proud of?

Mrs Chapman has been quoted as warning of the danger of making your child feel as though she’s the centre of the universe, and I wonder if that was what she meant. Of course she’s the centre of the universe, she’s your child. Pretending that everything she does is the best she could do is a pernicious lie, but a good word from a parent is a powerful thing, to be used with love and care.